Middlesex Marquee (again)

[jd-science.livejournal.com]

I just sent the following to the Middlesex Bank. I also e-mailed Rebekah about it. Does anyone else ever notice this trend on the marquee but me? It's annoying and depressing.


Hello-

I sent a comment on June 27, 2006 about the scrolling marquee outside your bank. I have not yet heard a response.

This is what I sent you then:

"I live in the Davis Square area and wanted to express my unhappiness with the new scrolling marquee above your bank. This weekend I was sitting in the square with some friends, and within five minutes we saw the words "death" and "kill" repeated several times. This does not seem appropriate at all for large, bright broadcasting in the middle of Davis Square.

I realize that the marquee was just scrolling news headlines, but I don't believe that news headlines - particularly those types of headlines - are really that important to building a truly informed public and in fact contribute to a destructive social atmosphere. If the marquee must be there (which I don't think it great, but I understand you've probably put a lot of money into it), I'd prefer it just to scroll the time, temperature, and maybe sports scores. And please nothing about death, killing, children being bombed, and so forth. We can get enough of that everywhere else."

Today, August 3, I was eating lunch in the square at around 1 pm, and one right after the other, I saw the following headlines scroll across, multiple times:

Iranian Woman Awaits Death By Stoning
New Surgical Procedure for Incontinence
Woman Afraid of Height Dies in Plane Crash
Israeli Bombing Kills 7
Welcome to Davis Square

There was another headline after the stoning that had something to do with death, but I don't exactly remember what it said.

This hardly seems appropriate to be displayed in large orange letters in the middle of Davis Square. Death, destruction, ridiculousness, and hey! Welcome to Davis!

I went into the bank to ask who to talk to about my issues with the sign, and the tellers told me Mr. Smoliss (?) was in charge. I asked if I could talk to him, and they said, “Well, his office is upstairs.” I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to just walk up and there and knock on the door, so I am writing via the official channel on your website.

At the recent Davis Square Task Force meeting, it was noted that the sign is only allowed, by law, to display the time, temperature, and public service announcements. The president also said he wanted the sign to promote community events and activities.

(for notes, see http://community.livejournal.com/davis_square/565301.html)

It hardly seems that what I saw today is in line with any of this. In addition, after all these useless, dramatic headlines were several about mergers and business acquisitions, also not of local community interest.

I would appreciate a response from you about this problem.

Comments

[artic-monkeys.livejournal.com]

I frequently check the page to see what posts were updated with new comments. It is a lot easier if I don't have to scroll pass large posts. If a post that i was interested in was commented i have to click on it anyway. So scrolling thru all of this can be burdensome especially when using this stupid laptop mouse. And the buttons on my other gadgets are even less ergonomic. check it out http://www.openmobilealliance.org/

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

A) I'd suggest using page-up/page-down... far better than scrollwheels for covering distance, until they put speed modifiers in to the wheels (which they may, but I've never seen).

B) Are you saying you want to be able to get to any random post on a page with a minimal number of keystrokes? Because the layout I use, for example, has comment count in the page summary on the top left of the page, and that might well be available in other situations. (The layout I use, when viewed in lynx, puts that summary at the top so there's a minimum of scrolling to see what's on the page.)

C) I'm not sure what I'm supposed to get from looking at the OMA link...

[artic-monkeys.livejournal.com]

Sorry for the confusion, I was definitely not clear about C)

It is all about "service interoperability across devices, geographies, service providers, operators,..." in our case operators.

It does us all no good to agree on a way of doing things, to come up with a standard if someone "pulls ahead" only to be "proprietary."